In a federal election campaign that pits three fairly mainstream parties against each other in a tight contest for middle-class respectability by way of making the most persuasive claim to the middle of the road on mostly bread and butter issues, maybe it was bound to happen.

Blame or credit will go to whichever of the Conservatives, the Liberals or the New Democrats one might prefer, but in the exertions the three leaders have been making to sustain the illusion that the most profound and existential questions are at stake in the federal election campaign, the whole thing has turned into a kind of seedy high-prairie carnival.

Suddenly it’s all dog-faced boys, bearded ladies, goats with two heads and hayseeds shooting arcade pellet guns at bottles. As soon as we stumble out of the darkness of the Tunnel Of Barbaric Practices Tip Line, shouting hawkers summon us to place our bets on a rigged boxing match where the dual-citizenship terrorist loser always gets deported. One minute there are exotic high-wire daredevils wearing niqabs, and the next minute, out of nowhere, the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement is on a rampage in the big tent.

Will the beast trample the Global Strategic Maple Syrup Reserve? Will millions of us wake up on Oct. 20 to discover we’ve been reduced to second-class citizens? Whatever will happen next?

It’s all so very exciting, but when the outward projection of “Canadian values” is made to transect with suffocating and self-righteous introspection in matters of Canadian identity, the funhouse mirrors that always accompany federal election campaigns are going to exaggerate out of all proportion the differences in policy and principle that distinguish Stephen Harper, Thomas Mulcair and Justin Trudeau from one another.

We’ll probably have to wait until all the strange animals are put back in their crates and the caravans have loaded up and left the fairgrounds before we can say for certain how things got so out of hand, and whether the Conservatives set out to make vulgar wedge issues the proving ground of their re-election hopes, or did so inadvertently, or whether the opposition parties deliberately took the bait, or did so by uncontrollable instinct. It’s risky business for all of them, in any case.

The official Opposition New Democrats are taking an opinion-poll thrashing in their Quebec stronghold, sundering them into third place in the national polls. This is their reward for leaving the impression that NDP policy demands that anyone found to express squeamishness about misogynist slave-wear from out of the ninth century becoming suitable attire for public oath-swearing citizenship ceremonies should be traduced as a drooling racist.

In Vancouver and its rapidly-expanding suburbs, Justin Trudeau’s Liberals have been on the back leg for quite some time owing to a crippling disarray in the old Liberal party machine brought about by offshore Chinese intrigues, candidate-vetting alarums and the inevitable shuddering in the party’s fund-raising apparatus. They’re now back in the race. Nobody saw this coming.

By persistently tracking their muddy campaign boots across Metro Vancouver’s shiny multicultural floors, the Conservatives have reduced themselves to unwelcome interlopers throughout the region’s vast and vote-rich Asian constituencies. Last week an Insights West poll revealed that a mere 14 per cent of respondents who identify as Asian say they’ll vote Conservative Oct. 19, which is way down from the 40 per cent who voted for Harper’s party in 2011. The Liberals and the NDP are coming in at 26 per cent and 23 per cent of decided Asian voters.

This is the pretty price Harper’s Conservatives are being made to pay for having let loose, either on purpose or by mistake, all those creepy lumpen elements from the darker regions of the party’s activist base that Conservative multiculturalism animateur Jason Kenney has managed to keep at bay during his long years of service in cultivating genuine affinities with “ethnic” voters across Canada.

What this will end up meaning on election day is anyone’s guess, of course, and it will also probably have to wait until the campaign circus has left town and the midway freak shows are just an embarrassing memory before it will be possible to pinpoint exactly the junctures when our politics went from being unexceptionally humdrum to pear-shaped to preposterous.

At this point in time it’s still not possible to say when the campaign really began, although it sure wasn’t when Harper invited Governor-General David Johnston to dissolve Parliament and allow the show to begin. Even so, hindsight is sufficient to permit a close pinpointing of the moment of no return to the final week of February. That’s when the Conservatives announced that only the adoption of Bill C-51, the passage of the Anti-Terrorism Act and Harper’s re-election would prevent suicide bombers from Al Shabaab from sneaking into the West Edmonton Mall and blowing the place sky high.

Neither the long arc of Canadian history nor comparisons with similarly liberal-democratic nation states will do us much good in sorting out how such deep anxieties about identity, citizenship and belonging have become so inflamed. And there’s little point in looking back for guidance or precedent upon the innumerable indecencies this country’s Liberal and Conservatives equally committed against Canadians not fortunate enough to have been born into the French-Catholic or Anglo-Protestant ascendancy.

Harper’s Conservatives, having emerged from a melange of Reform Party and Alliance Party populists and the survivors of the Progressive Conservative Party’s 1993 implosion, are by no means the Conservatives of old. Justin Trudeau’s Liberal party is similarly distant from the Liberal party that governed Canada for most of the 20th century: at least 70 per cent of the Liberals’ membership ranks are Trudeau’s own recruits.

As for those New Democrats who claim an inheritance of virtue from the NDP’s precursor, the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, it’s only by the advantage of historical revisionism that they can get away with it. You’d never know it from the official stories, but the CCF enthusiastically supported Ottawa’s legalized theft of fishing boats from Japanese-Canadians after Imperial Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941, and the CCF was soon agitating for the expulsion of all Japanese-Canadians from the British Columbia coast, “forthwith” and “speedily,” but of course “humanely, and with a minimum of family and social dislocation.”

It’s weird enough that one of the flash points in the culture war this election campaign has become is the otherwise trivial matter of oath-swearing while veiled. Weirder still is the sudden hubbub over the federal Crown’s authority to annul the Canadian citizenship of convicted dual-citizenship terrorists and traitors – a long-standing Canadian custom, and a largely uncontroversial practice in most European countries.

But here’s weird for you. The recently court-affirmed federal restriction on the voting rights of long-absent citizens, a convention of similar antiquity and international ubiquity as citizenship revocation, is being heralded as some sort of Conservative plot to disenfranchise Donald Sutherland, the famous American actor, or American-resident Canadian actor, or Ontario cottager, or whatever he is. The 190,000 Hong Kongers similarly bereft of voting privileges by the courts’ clarification of the rules hasn’t even had a decent look-in.

Weird is the new normal, so maybe we’d all just better get used to it.

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